Sustainable transport funding announced for England: £440m over 6 years

Following earlier announcements of capital funding for infrastructure projects, the Government has now announced the allocations of £64m in supporting revenue funding to encourage the use of sustainable transport.

New money for sustainable transport

This funding - together with matched local contributions - amounts to £2.75 per person, per year until 2021 for around half of England's population.

The other half of England's population will receive no funding whatsoever from this source.

The Department has awarded funding to those English local authorities who have found other sources of cash to contribute to the projects, such as the infrastructure funding announced on Monday. The fund, called the Local Sustainable Transport Fund (LSTF) is the continuation of dedicated funding that had initially been allocated in 2011, and was to have run out in 2015.

However, there is still far more money going on expanding existing roads or building new ones, with over £1.5bn for local roads alone, and many billions more to be spent on the strategic road network in England.

It's likely that a small proportion of the funding will go to cycling. The current LSTF amounts to over £1bn over the last 4 years, so this funding represents a big fall in spending on sustainable transport, although other funding has been announced for large public transport schemes. The Department for Transport claims that 28% of current sustainable transport funding goes on cycling: if replicated amongst the new projects, that would amount to under 80p per person, per year, on cycling in the areas that receive sustainable transport funding.

This new funding is a long way from the secure, long-term funding at £10-20 required if we are to get Britain cycling. At best, this is just 80p per person on cycling for half the population of England, on top of scraps from other budgets.

Chris PeckCTC Policy Coordinator

Of course, there are other sources of cycling spending, including some capital schemes dedicated solely to cycling - some of which are continuations of the Cycling City programme, the programme funding for which ends in March 2015.

Get Britain Cycling?

However, the funding is a very long way short of the dedicated, long-term funding for cycling at £10-20 per head, called for in the Get Britain Cycling report. London is spending around £10-12 per head, and it is resources at that level that achieve high quality cycle infrastructure.

The following map shows where the funding is being distributed from the recent announcement. Sixty-nine local authorities are included within the areas funded, amounting to over 26 million people, roughly half of the population of England.